[Freeciv-Dev] Re: More on (un)happiness

[Marko Lindqvist <caz@xxxxxxxxx>]

 Sorry for late anwer.

 It seems that you are against all expansion, when I think
expansion outwards is ok and actually requires skill. We seem to agree
that cities should overlap less (few big cities instead of lots of small
ones).

 Also, I have to admit that it's really long time since I last time played
with default rules.


On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Mike Jing wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Marko Lindqvist wrote:
>
> >Have you tried it with small islands? When min_dist_bw_cities have value
> >greater than 3, you might are forced to leave some squares totally unused
> >near coastline (place for next city center is at sea). How big problem this
> >is?
>
> Indeed, you do have to leave some squares unused, even if you are not on a
> small island.  I don't think this is a big deal; you just have to choose
> your city sites much more carefully.

 Umh, I just found out that my own rulesets use value 3 :)

 I remembered that we were using value 2 and one more sounded a bit too
big when there's a lot of coastline. (I have sometimes used value 4 with
big landmass)

> >I'm  not suggesting that we change default researchspeed and foodbox. I
> >just hope that this gives some new ideas to you. One way to fight smallpox
> >syndrome is to make losing a city to hurt deeply no matter how many other
> >cities one has.
>
> The point of ICS or smallpox strategy is that it gives you so many cities
> that losing one, or even a dozen won't affect you much at all.  At the same

 My point was that no matter how many cities you have, there is constant
added to it's value when you lose it. So, you don't lose just (1/number of
cities) of your empire, but much more. Currently only such constant is
fact that enemy gets one free (if conquercost=0) tech from you. I know;
one tech is next to nothing with default rules.

> >I don't like ideas about making unhappiness to grow really dramatically
> >when number of cities grow. Even when someone has lots of big cities, it
> >should be possible to get even stronger by founding new cities.
>
> I am not at all surprised to see a lot of people opposed to this.  But if
> you think about it for a minute, you will see that it's the perfect way to
> balance a multiplayer game, because it puts a limit on expansion so that
> everyone will end up with more or less the same number of cities.  The
> problem with any civ type game is that exponential expansion will magnify
> any difference in initial conditions many times over after a couple of
> hundred turns, so without any mechanisms to limit the expansion, the person
> with the most land area will win most of the time

 But taking control of biggest land area shows skill by itself (gen1 is
unfair, no matter what you do). If one can drive other players out of some
area, he have earned right to build cities there. Also, number of cities
grows when you conquer/buy enemy cities. I don't think that only smallpox
players conquer enemy cities :)
 So I still think that you should not punish players severely simply
because they have many cities. That said, I don't have anything against
that we slow expansion down.



 Caz

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